LITTLE CURRENT—Controversy swirled like the winter wind last week over the holiday favourite ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ but Manitoulin’s radio stations, GLOW 100 and CHAW Great Lakes Country, have decided to stay the course and continue to play the 1940s-era song this Christmas.
‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ was written in 1944 by Frank Loesser as a “call and response” type lyric intended to be sung by a man and a woman and later sold to MGM where the song appeared in the 1949 movie ‘Neptune’s Daughter’ which earned the movie an Academy Award for Best Song. While the song was never intended to be a Christmas tune, it became one and featured prominently on holiday hit lists around the globe, that is until last week when major radio stations in North America announced they would no longer play the song because it was deemed manipulative and inappropriate in the era of the #MeToo movement.
Especially displeasing to many is the line, sung by the female singer in the piece, ‘Say, what’s in this drink? (No cabs to be had out there)’ with suggestions in the #MeToo era that the woman in the song may have had her drink spiked with a date rape drug.
After a conversation with station staff, Craig and Kelly Timmermans made the decision to continue to play ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside.’ While the Timmermans agree that it’s important, especially in their business, to be politically, culturally and gender sensitive, they think that the move to ban the beloved song is taking it a step too far.
“I don’t believe it has anything to do with the #MeToo movement and that people are now being reactionary rather than thoughtful,” Ms. Timmermans said.
The song, she continued, “is about the dance of courtship between a man and a woman. It’s an iconic song that’s meant to be cute.”
“We need to be sensitive, yes, but we’ve become so oversensitive that it devalues the real topic,” Ms. Timmermans added.
“We will continue to play it,” Ms. Timmermans said of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside.’ “We have six versions of it on Great Lakes Country and three or four versions on GLOW.”
